Monthly Archives: September 2015

When I was a child I clearly remember that all the books I use to read whether school text books, comic books or any other books; all were maintained neat and clean. I never used to scribble or mark anything with pencil or pen inside the books I read. I am a person who likes to keep all my books very tidy.

I have seen lots of people reading books with a pen in their hand – underlining paragraphs, making notes on the sides of the book, folding pages. Well I can’t withstand doing all this.

Now-a-days there are colourful highlighters available which many people use for different purposes, fluorescent green for less important, blue as more important, red as highly important :). Also now there are colourful strips of page markers available too which one can use to avoid folding page. Well, I still will avoid any such fancy highlighters in my books.

Till date I have preserved few of my engineering books as well as few other books which I felt I would need and I enjoy reading it again. If you happen to go through those books of mine then you will find them very neat and clean, maybe very few places there will be marks of brackets “( & )” that too made with pencil. I feel using a pen or highlighter on printed words is like doing cruelty on the book. A pen in hand while reading is like a hawk flying over the fields waiting to pounce for prey.

Some do say that marking helps going through the important texts on last-minute. Do marking full paragraphs and pages by pages solve the purpose of importance? Well I think that every word in the text books during school or college time is important.

I have tried reading books with a pen in hand and I could not concentrate on my reading as I was more worried that the printed text might get hurt with the sharp object in my hand. My childhood habit did not let me scratch a single line. And now with e-books and e-readers marking with pen will soon get extinct.

What about you? Do you use a pen while reading? Or are you inline with me of avoiding any marking in the books?